Ukraine

Capitol: Kiev (Kyyiv)
Population 2,600,000

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Ukraine
"Richly endowed in natural resources, Ukraine has been fought over and subjugated for
centuries; its 20th-century struggle for liberty is not yet complete. A short-lived
independence from Russia (1917-1920) was followed by brutal Soviet rule that engineered
two artificial famines (1921-22 and 1932-33) in which over 8 million died, and World War
II, in which German and Soviet armies were responsible for some 7 million more deaths.
Although independence was attained in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, true freedom
remains elusive as many of the former Soviet elite remain entrenched, stalling efforts at
economic reform, privatization, and civil liberties."

Climate: temperate continental; Mediterranean only on the
southern Crimean coast; precipitation disproportionately distributed, highest in west and
north, lesser in east and southeast; winters vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold
farther inland; summers are warm across the greater part of the country, hot in the south

Terrain: most of Ukraine consists of fertile plains (steppes) and
plateaus, mountains being found only in the west (the Carpathians), and in the Crimean
Peninsula in the extreme south

Currency: on 2 September 1996, Ukraine introduced the long-awaited
hryvnia (plural hryvni) as its national currency, replacing the karbovanets (in
circulation since 12 November 1992) at a rate of 100,000 karbovantsi to 1 hryvnia

-- CIA World Factbook

The EconomyAfter Russia, the
Ukrainian republic was far and away the most important economic component of the former
Soviet Union, producing about four times the output of the next-ranking republic. Its
fertile black soil generated more than one-fourth of Soviet agricultural output, and its
farms provided substantial quantities of meat, milk, grain, and vegetables to other
republics. Likewise, its diversified heavy industry supplied the unique equipment (for
example, large diameter pipes) and raw materials to industrial and mining sites (vertical
drilling apparatus) in other regions of the former USSR. Ukraine depends on imports of
energy, especially natural gas, to meet some 85% of its annual energy requirements.
Shortly after independence in December 1991, the Ukrainian Government liberalized most
prices and erected a legal framework for privatization, but widespread resistance to
reform within the government and the legislature soon stalled reform efforts and led to
some backtracking. Output by 1999 had fallen to less than 40% of the 1991 level. Loose
monetary policies pushed inflation to hyperinflationary levels in late 1993. Ukraine's
dependence on Russia for energy supplies and the lack of significant structural reform
have made the Ukrainian economy vulnerable to external shocks. Now in his second term,
President KUCHMA has pledged to reduce the number of government agencies, streamline the
regulatory process, create a legal environment to encourage entrepreneurs, and enact a
comprehensive tax overhaul. Reforms in the more politically sensitive areas of structural
reform and land privatization are still lagging. Outside institutions - particularly the
IMF - have encouraged Ukraine to quicken the pace and scope of reforms. GDP in 2000 showed
strong export-based growth of 6% - the first growth since independence - and industrial
production grew 12.9%. The economy continued to expand in 2001 as real GDP rose 9% and
industrial output grew by over 14%. Growth of 4.1% in 2002 was more moderate, in part a
reflection of faltering growth in the developed world. In general, growth has been
undergirded by strong domestic demand, low inflation, and solid consumer and investor
confidence. Growth was a sturdy 8.2% in 2003 despite a loss of momentum in needed economic
reforms.

A Little of Slavic and Ukrainian
History"Ukrainians trace their ancestry to the East
Slavic tribes that inhabited the present-day Ukrainian Republic in the first centuries
after the birth of Christ and were part of the state of Kievan Rus' formed in the ninth
century. For a century after the breakup of Kievan Rus', the independent principalities of
Galicia and Volhynia served as Ukrainian political and cultural centers. In the fourteenth
century, Galicia was absorbed by Poland, and Volhynia, together with Kiev, became part of
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1569 Volhynia and Kiev also came under Polish rule, an
event that significantly affected Ukrainian society, culture, language, and religion.
Ukrainian peasants, except for those who fled to join the Cossacks (see
Glossary) in the frontier regions southeast of Poland, were enserfed. Many Ukrainian
nobles were Polonized.

The continuous
oppression of the Ukrainian people by the Polish nobility led to a series of popular
insurrections, culminating in 1648, when Ukrainian Cossacks joined in a national uprising.
Intermittent wars with Poland forced the Ukrainian Cossacks to place Ukraine under the
protection of the Muscovite tsar. A prolonged war between Muscovy and Poland followed,
ending in 1667 with a treaty that split Ukraine along the Dnepr River. Ukrainian territory
on the right (generally western) bank of the Dnepr remained under Poland, while Ukrainian
territory on the left (generally eastern) bank was placed under the suzerainty of the
Muscovite tsar. Although both segments of Ukraine were granted autonomous status, Muscovy
and Poland followed policies to weaken Ukrainian autonomy. A number of uprisings by
Ukrainian peasantry led to the crushing of the remainder of Ukrainian autonomy in Poland
(see Expansion
and Westernization , ch. 1). Ukrainian self-rule under the tsar ended after Mazepa,
the Ukrainian hetman (leader), defected to the Swedish side during the war between Russia
and Sweden at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In 1775 Catherine the Great
dispersed the Ukrainian Cossacks and enserfed those Ukrainian peasants who had remained
free. The partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century placed most of the
Ukrainian territory on the right bank of the Dnepr River under Russian rule. The
westernmost part of Ukraine (known as western Ukraine) was incorporated into the Austrian
Empire.

The resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness
in the nineteenth century was fostered by a renewed interest among intellectuals in
Ukrainian history, culture, and language and the founding of many scholarly, cultural, and
social societies. The Russian government responded by harassing, imprisoning, and exiling
leading Ukrainian intellectuals. Ukrainian academic and social societies were disbanded.
Publications, plays, and concerts in Ukrainian were forbidden. Finally, the existence of a
Ukrainian language and nationality was officially denied. Nevertheless, a Ukrainian
national movement in the Russian Empire persisted, spurred partially by developments in
western Ukraine, where Ukrainians in the more liberal Austrian Empire had far greater
freedom to develop their culture and language.

After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917
and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Ukrainians in both empires proclaimed their
independence and established national republics. In 1919 the two republics united into one
Ukrainian national state. This unification, however, could not withstand the aggression of
both the Red and White Russian forces and the hostile Polish forces in western Ukraine.
Ukraine again was partitioned, with western Ukraine incorporated into the new Polish state
and the rest of Ukraine established as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in March
1919, which was later incorporated into the Soviet Union when it was formed in December
1922.

In the decade of
the 1920s, the Ukrainian Republic experienced a period of Ukrainization. Ukrainian
communists enjoyed a great deal of autonomy in running the republic, and Ukrainian culture
and language dominated. Stalin's rise to power, however, halted the process of
Ukrainization. Consequently, Ukrainian intellectual and cultural elites were either
executed or deported, and leading Ukrainian party leaders were replaced by non-Ukrainians.
The peasantry was forcibly collectivized, leading to a mass famine in 1932-33 in which
several million peasants starved to death. Pointing to the fact that grain was forcibly
requisitioned from the peasantry despite the protests of the Soviet government in the
Ukrainian Republic, some historians believe that Stalin knowingly brought about the famine
to stop national ferment in the Ukrainian Republic and break the peasants' resistance to
collectivization. When western Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Union following
the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, the population suffered terror and mass
deportations.

When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in
1941, Ukrainians anticipated establishing an independent Ukraine. As the Red Army
retreated eastward, Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed an independent state, but the
invading Germans arrested and interned its leaders. Ukrainian nationalist forces
consequently began a resistance movement against both the occupying Germans and the Soviet
partisans operating in the Ukrainian Republic. When the Red Army drove the Germans out of
the Ukrainian Republic, Ukrainian partisans turned their struggle (which continued until
1950) against the Soviet army (the name changed from Red Army just after the war) and
Polish communist forces in western Ukraine. The Soviet regime deported Ukrainian
intelligentsia to Siberia and imported Russians into the Ukrainian Republic as part of
their pacification and Russification
(see Glossary) efforts.

The vast majority of Ukrainians, the second
largest nationality in the Soviet Union with about 44 million people in 1989, lived in the
Ukrainian Republic. Substantial numbers of Ukrainians also lived in the Russian, Kazakh,
and Moldavian republics. Many nonUkrainians lived in the Ukrainian Republic, where the
Russians, with over 11 million, constituted the largest group.

Ukrainians have a distinctive language, culture,
and history. In 1989, despite strong Russifying influence, about 81.1 percent of
Ukrainians residing in their own republic claimed Ukrainian as their first language.

By the 1980s, the majority of Ukrainians, once
predominantly agrarian, lived in cities. The major Ukrainian cities in 1989 were Kiev, the
capital of the Ukrainian Republic, with a population of 2.6 million, and Khar'kov,
Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, and Donetsk, all with over 1 million people.

Although Ukrainians constituted about 15 percent
of the Soviet Union's population in 1989, their educational and employment opportunities
appeared unequal to their share of the population. In the 1970s, they ranked only eleventh
out of seventeen major nationalities (the nationalities corresponding to the fifteen union
republics plus Jews and Tatars) in the number of students in secondary and higher
education and ninth in the number of scientific workers in proportion to their share of
the total population. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, the number of Ukrainians in the
CPSU has steadily increased. Nevertheless, Ukrainians remained underrepresented in the
party relative to their share of the population. This was particularly true in the
Ukrainian Republic, where in the 1970s the Ukrainian proportion of party membership was
substantially below their proportion of the population. The percentage of Russians in the
CPSU in the Ukrainian Republic, however, was considerably higher than their share of the
republic's population. Although in the past Ukrainians had held a disproportionately high
percentage of seats on the CPSU Central Committee, since 1961 their share of membership in
this body has steadily declined to 13 percent of the seats in 1986.

Data as of May
1989Country Studies/Russia: See The
Inhabitants of the East European Plain